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Upgrading #OpsMgr 1801 to 1807 - Fieldnotes
My Fieldnotes are quick, unrefined notations and reflections from the field.
Content may be obvious and unnecessary to some, useful to others. The main purpose is for them to be used as a searchable notebook.
These Notes are not to be seen as a manual, a how-to or a set of instructions, but rather a collection of thoughts, reflections and experiences from my field-work.
Abstract
Upgrades from OpsMgr (SCOM) 1801 to 1807 is generally a safe operation. Can be done using Windows Update if you want to, but I would suggest only letting Management Servers, Reporting Servers and Web Console servers pre-load the update for a controlled update at a suitable time.
I general, the updates goes smooth, but you still have to run the SQL-script(s) and import the updated Management Packs provided with the update. This should be done directly after updating the last Management Server.
Links
Official Documentation
Download Location
Announcement Blog
What’s New! - Webinar Recording
List of fixes
Notes
Updating the Management Servers
Fairly quick update, may need a restart afterwards.

A Collection of OpsMgr Upgrade Fails
I’ll be frank on this one; Microsoft really dropped the ball on the 1801 setup program.
No upgrade or update has been this ridden with faults and obscure errors, not even the infamous SCOM 2007 SP1 setup. And this is not only errors that will abort the installation, they will actively remove your existing SCOM Components and cause a restore, either from snapshot/checkpoint or from backup.
MAKE SURE YOUR BACKUPS ARE WORKING!!!
Rollbacks don’t work in 1801, at all. You have been warned.
Here’s my list of the issues I’ve seen and wrestled so far.
.NET 3.5 Pre-requisites
Although neither SCOM 2016 nor 1801 actually has a .NET 3.5 requirement, the setup think it does.
The Prerequisute checker isn’t aware though, meaning it will happily try to upgrade and then fail. And, boy, does it fail spectacularly!
When the upgrade failes, it’s supposed to perform a rollback, and reading the setup log it actually do try.
Unfortunatly, the “rollback” will remove any existing SCOM Roles in the server. O_o
Yes, thats right. Your Management Server is no longer a Management Server!
Workaround
Make sure all SCOM Management Servers have .NET Framework 3.5 installed before attempting an upgrade.

GS01 - Microsoft for the modern data estate
Sep 25, 2:15 pm – 3:30 pm
Quick Notes
Massive and growing amounts of data.
Companies that out-develop themselves.
Some companies have learned to leverage and gain from the data, like Honeywell, DocuSign and Jet.
Hybrid is the way to go. Quick hands-up:
Almost no companies believe all-public is even possible
Almost all see a hybrid solution is the thing.
SQL 2017 GA 2017-10-02:
Available on:
Windows
Linux
Docker
Kubernetes…
*applause*
Gives superb compatibility over many platforms and distributions.
2+ million docker pulls.
Lots of focus on performance and security. has the smallest amount of vulnerabilities.
Only commercial dB with AI built in.
R and Python support OOB.
BI included in license; web, desktop and mobile.
Support for graph data and queries.
Advanced machine learning with R + Python.
Native TSQL scoring.
Adaptive query processing and Automatic plan correction.
Special pricing (30%) for SQL on Red hat
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Like a SQL instance on premise, in the cloud. without the server.
Easy to migrate as it’s the same thing.
Management using the same tools as always.
SQL SA customers get discounts on Azure SQL.
Other stuff
Vulnerability assessment for GDPR.
Intelligent insights into performance.

TLDR
Quick and dirty macro to resize all images in a word document to 145 mm. I am lazy like that.
Get the gist of it here.
The “Why”
Ok, so. I am a consultant, as you may know. And as a consultant, people pay me to do stuff and expect me to be efficient and deliver with high quality.
Part of that entails writing documentation containing how I do stuff, where I do it and often why I do it.
This documentation is expected to be detailed enough to make sure my customers will be able to follow the steps and produce a copy of my work. Most of the time
these document are a big part of the disaster recovery processes and might have to be executed by the on-call staff with no previous knowledge of the product.
This means screenshots. Lots of screenshots.
And while templates are nice and help me out a lot, the screenshots have to be from the actual installation and not some copy-pasta from a previous assignment.
To help me out, I use the excellent free program Greenshot to quickly generate screenshots into a WIP-folder (or directly into Word if that is appropriate) and that makes it possible to
grab snapshots of the process without having to pause all the time to PrtScn-Alt+Tab-Ctrl+V-Crop-Ctrl+C-Alt+Tab-Ctrl+C. I simply press PrtScn and go on with the installation.
Being a bit pedantic, doesn’t help me out here though as I find myself selecting and resizing all the images in the Word document I have produced. This is a very time-consuming process and not the most exact one either.
I want all images to be of scaled, if necessary, to an equal maximum width that fits comfortably withing the margins of the document template my company has prepared for me.
So I created a fairly simple macro to do it for me.
The “How”
If you are un-familiar with macros in Word, you will find them under the “View” tab.
Clicking on “Macros” will give you the option to execute the ones you have, or you can create your own using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).
To create one, select where you want it saved (normal.dotx in my case, as I want it readily available) and enter a name for it.
This will bring up the Visual Basic for Applications IDE, where you can write your own fun stuff.

TLDR
Customer wanted to see all RDS Host servers in a view with their current total session count.
Decided to use a powershell grid dashboard, and share the script.
Here’s the gist of it: SCOM_RDSH_TotalSession_PoSHWidget.ps1
How To
Keeping it fairly short this time.
Pre-requisites are:
System Center 2012 R2 with UR2 or later
Microsoft RDS Management Pack
Microsoft Windows Core OS Management Pack
Create a dashboard
Rightclick and create a new view somewhere, make it a Dashboard View
Enter Name and Description
Select Grid type, and layout

We’re moving!
Yep. Again. Although, it’s been a year or two since the last time.
The reason(s)
Ok, so I’ve using Wordpress for quite a long time now and it’s been good. Mostly.
It’s a fairly solid platform and has a whole slew of feautures that work nicely.
Before Wordpress I used Textpattern, a very slimmed, minimalistic authoring experience and my first contact with textile and
similar markup/writing/notation languages. For those unaware, textile is not unlike markdown.
Or should we say that markdown is not unlike textile? Considering that textile was invented by Dean Allen two years before markdown.
Anyhow. Both work pretty much as good as the other, allowing the author to write in any text-editor, using easily readable and fairly logical formatting.
Before that I used Movable Type, and prior to that either Dreamweaver or… well, notepad or vim.
Problem with all of those platforms, however, is that they require dynamically generated webpages and technologies like PHP, Perl, .NET, Java and whatnot.
That, in itself, has been a very minor issue until lately. Sure, it requires servers with logics, engines, add-ons, execution rights to the local filesystem etc, but
still a minor nuisance. Mostly a financial nuisance really as active servers tend to cost money while finding static hosting for free is still pretty easy.
Hell! I could put a webserver on a RaspberryPi and get good performance for a small-ish blog like mine if all I am using is static content.
But, again. Not a major problem in itself. The main instigating factors to move away from Wordpress are the increasing size of the package, the lack of personal control,
the lack of ease to extend my platform due to ever-expanding APIs and the fact that it is so popular that every “hacker” and it’s mother knows how to find exploits on it.
My webhost, NFSN has been very good at detecting probing and brute-force attempts and automatically block public access to stuff like the login-pages and XML-RPC interfaces when that happens.
I am just so sick and tired of having to constantly be on top of it with software updates, plugin updates, theme updates, security updates, spam-filtering, re-enabling the login page…
Back to the basics
Teknoglot.se will be served statically from now on, and it will be hosted for free on Github Pages.
Using Hexo.io I can write my posts using markdown, then with a simple hexo generate --deploy generate and update the static files and publish them.
No login pages to hack, no dynamic pages to exploit, no server security to worry about.